On pp. 140–141 of the "Essays," A. Lunacharsky cites Engels's arguments in *Anti-Dühring* on this question and fully endorses Engels's characterization of the matter—which is "remarkable in its clarity and precision"—on the corresponding "marvelous page"[110] of the said work.

There is indeed much that is marvelous here. And most marvelous of all is that neither A. Lunacharsky nor a heap of other Machists who wish to be Marxists "failed to notice" the *epistemological significance* of Engels's arguments on freedom and necessity. They read—they read indeed and copied—they copied indeed, but they did not understand the connection between things.

Engels says: "Hegel was the first to state correctly the relation between freedom and necessity. For him freedom is the appreciation of necessity. 'Blind necessity, only insofar as it is not understood.' Freedom does not consist in the dream of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility thus afforded of making them work toward definite aims. This applies as much to the laws of external nature as to those that govern the bodily and mental existence of men themselves—two classes of laws which we can only separate in our conception, not in reality. Freedom of will therefore means nothing but the ability to make decisions with knowledge of the matter. Therefore, the freer a man's judgment is in relation to a definite question, the greater is the necessity with which the content of this judgment will be determined… Freedom therefore consists in the control over ourselves and over external nature, a control founded on knowledge of the necessities of nature" (pp. 112–113 of the fifth German edition){55}.

Let us analyze upon what epistemological premises this entire argument is based.

First, Engels recognizes from the very outset of his arguments the laws of nature, the laws of external nature, the necessity of nature—i.e., all that which Mach, Avenarius, Petzoḷdt and Company declare to be "metaphysics." If Lunacharsky had wished to think carefully over Engels's "marvelous" arguments, he could not have failed to see the fundamental distinction between the materialist theory of knowledge and agnosticism and idealism, which deny the lawfulness of nature or declare it to be only "logical," etc., etc., etc.

Second, Engels does not concern himself with the torturous extraction of "definitions" of freedom and necessity—those scholastic definitions which occupy the reactionary professors most of all (like Avenarius) and their pupils (like Bogdanov). Engels takes human knowledge and will—on the one hand, the necessity of nature—on the other, and instead of any definition, any definite formula, he simply states that the necessity of nature is primary, and human will and consciousness are secondary. The latter must, inevitably and necessarily must, adapt themselves to the former; Engels considers this so self-evident that he does not waste superfluous words on clarifying his view. Only Russian Machists could complain about Engels's general definition of materialism (nature is primary, consciousness is secondary: recall Bogdanov's "perplexities" on this score!) and at the same time find "marvelous" and "strikingly precise" one of Engels's particular applications of this general and fundamental definition!

Third, Engels does not doubt the existence of "blind necessity." He acknowledges the existence of necessity not yet comprehended by man. This is clearer than clear from the cited passage. And yet, from the standpoint of the Machists, how can man know of the existence of that which he does not know? Know of the existence of unapprehended necessity? Is this not "mysticism," not "metaphysics," not the recognition of "fetishes" and "idols," not the "Kantian unknowable thing-in-itself"? If the Machists would only ponder deeply, they could not fail to notice the complete identity between Engels's arguments concerning the knowability of the objective nature of things and concerning the transformation of the "thing-in-itself" into the "thing-for-us," on the one hand, and his arguments concerning blind, unapprehended necessity—on the other. The development of consciousness in each individual human being and the development of the collective knowledge of all humanity at every step shows us the transformation of the unapprehended "thing-in-itself" into the apprehended "thing-for-us," the transformation of blind, unapprehended necessity, "necessity-in-itself," into apprehended "necessity-for-us." Epistemologically there is absolutely no difference whatsoever between the one transformation and the other, for the basic point of view is the same in both cases—namely: the materialist point of view, the recognition of the objective reality of the external world and the laws of external nature, and these laws and this world are entirely knowable to man, but can never be completely known by him. We do not know the necessity of nature in the phenomena of weather and to that extent we are inevitably slaves of the weather. But, not knowing this necessity, we know that it exists. Whence comes this knowledge? From the same source from which comes the knowledge that things exist outside our consciousness and independently of it, namely: from the development of our knowledge, which millions of times shows each man that ignorance is replaced by knowledge when an object acts upon our sense organs, and conversely: knowledge is transformed into ignorance when the possibility of such action is eliminated.

Fourth, in the cited argument Engels clearly applies the "saltatory" method in philosophy—i.e., makes a leap from theory to practice. Not one of those learned (and foolish) professors of philosophy in whose footsteps our Machists follow ever allows himself such leaps, which are shameful for a representative of "pure science." For them, one thing is the theory of knowledge, in which one must somehow craftily contrive "definitions," and quite another is practice. For Engels, all living human practice bursts into the very theory of knowledge itself, providing an objective criterion of truth: so long as we do not know the law of nature, it, existing and acting independently of and outside our knowledge, makes us slaves of "blind necessity." Once we have learned this law, which acts (as Marx repeated thousands of times) independently of our will and our consciousness—we become masters of nature. Mastery over nature, manifesting itself in the practice of humanity, is the result of an objectively correct reflection in the human head of the phenomena and processes of nature, is the proof that this reflection (within the bounds of what practice shows us) is an objective, absolute, eternal truth.

What do we get as a result? Every step in Engels's argument, almost literally every sentence, every proposition, is built entirely and exclusively upon the epistemology of dialectical materialism, upon premises that strike a blow at all Machist nonsense about bodies as complexes of sensations, about "elements," about the "coincidence of sense perception with reality existing outside us," etc., etc., etc. Not in the least disconcerted by this, the Machists renounce materialism, repeat (à la Berman) the hackneyed banalities about dialectics and then immediately afterward embrace with open arms one of the applications of dialectical materialism! They have drawn their philosophy from an eclectic beggarly broth and they continue to regale the reader with the same. They take a bit of agnosticism and a dash of idealism from Mach, combining this with a bit of dialectical materialism from Marx, and lisp that this mishmash is a development of Marxism. They think that if Mach, Avenarius, Petzoḷdt and all their other authorities have not the slightest idea of the solution to the question (of freedom and necessity) given by Hegel and Marx, this is pure chance: they simply did not read such-and-such a page in such-and-such a little book—rather than the fact that these "authorities" were and remain utter ignoramuses regarding the actual progress of philosophy in the nineteenth century, were and remain philosophical obscurantists.

Here is the argument of one such obscurantist, an ordinary professor of philosophy at the University of Vienna, Ernst Mach:

"The correctness of the position of determinism or indeterminism cannot be proved. Only a completed or provably impossible science could decide this question. The matter concerns such premises as we introduce (man heranbringt) into the consideration of things, depending on whether we assign more or less significant subjective weight (subjektives Gewicht) to previous successes or failures of research. But during research every thinker is necessarily theoretically a determinist" (*Knowledge and Error*, 2nd German ed., pp. 282–283).

Is this not obscurantism, when pure theory is carefully barricaded off from practice? When determinism is confined to the realm of "research," and in the realm of morality, social activity, in all other spheres except "research," the question is left to "subjective" evaluation? In my study, says the learned pedant, I am a determinist, but as for the philosopher concerning himself with a coherent, all-embracing worldview encompassing both theory and practice, constructed on the basis of determinism—there is no question of that. Mach talks nonsense because theoretically the question of the relation between freedom and necessity is completely obscure to him.

"…Every new discovery reveals the deficiencies of our knowledge, discovers hitherto unnoticed vestiges of dependencies" (283)… Excellent! This "vestiges" is the "thing-in-itself," which our knowledge reflects ever more deeply, is it not? Not at all: "…Thus even he who theoretically upholds extreme determinism must necessarily remain in practice an indeterminist" (283)… Well, so they have divided the spoils amicably[111]: theory to the professors, practice to the theologians! Or: in theory, objectivism (i.e., "bashful" materialism), in practice—the "subjective method in sociology"{56}. That Russian ideologues of the bourgeoisie, the Populists, from Lesevich to Chernov, sympathize with this vulgar philosophy is unsurprising. That people who wish to be Marxists have been taken in by such nonsense, modestly covering up especially absurd conclusions of Mach, is truly lamentable.

But on the question of will, Mach does not limit himself to confusion and halfway agnosticism, but goes much further… "Our sensation of hunger," we read in the *Mechanics*, "is not different in essence from the striving of sulfuric acid toward zinc, our will is not so very different from the pressure of a stone upon its support." "We shall thus be closer to nature" (i.e., with such a view), "without needing to decompose man into an incomprehensible heap of nebulous atoms or turn the world into a system of spiritual compounds" (p. 434 of the French translation). So, no need for materialism ("nebulous atoms" or electrons, i.e., recognition of the objective reality of the material world), no need for such idealism which would recognize the world as "the otherness" of spirit, but an idealism is possible which recognizes the world as will! We stand above not only materialism but also above the idealism of "any kind of" Hegel, but we do not mind flirting a bit with idealism in the spirit of Schopenhauer! Our Machists, putting on the air of injured innocence at every mention of Mach's proximity to philosophical idealism, preferred here too to simply pass over this delicate point in silence. And yet in philosophical literature it is difficult to find an exposition of Mach's views in which his inclination toward Willensmetaphysik—i.e., voluntaristic idealism—is not noted. On this Yu. Bauman[112] pointed out—and the Machist opposing him, G. Kleinpeter, did not refute this point and declared that Mach is of course "closer to Kant and Berkeley than to the metaphysical empiricism (i.e., spontaneous materialism) dominant in the natural sciences" (ibid., vol. 6, p. 87). E. Becher points to the same thing, noting that if Mach in some places acknowledges voluntaristic metaphysics and in others renounces it, this merely testifies to the arbitrariness of his terminology; in fact, Mach's closeness to voluntaristic metaphysics is undoubted[113]. The admixture of this metaphysics (i.e., idealism) to "phenomenology" (i.e., agnosticism) is acknowledged by Lucka[114]. The same thing is pointed out by W. Wundt[115]. That Mach is a phenomenalist, "not averse to voluntaristic idealism," is also stated in the handbook on the history of modern philosophy by Überweg-Heinze[116].

In short, the eclecticism of Mach and his inclination toward idealism are clear to everyone, except perhaps to the Russian Machists.